Me, I’m going to relax while I can, she thought. There was a lot of waiting in the Army, that was about the worst thing . . . apart from the crowding and the monotonous food, and good Christ but being under fire was scary. Not nice-scary like being on a board when the surf was hot or a practice jump; plain bad. You really felt good afterward, though, when your body realized it was alive . . .
She pushed the thought out of her head. The sitreps had said this was going to be much worse than Sicily, and that had been deep-shit enough. Still, there had been good parts. The Italians really had some pretty things, and the paratroops got the first pick. That jewelry from the bishop’s palace in Palermo was absolutely divine! And the tapestry . . . she sighed and smiled, in reminiscence. There had been leave, too—empty space on transport airships heading south, if you knew the right people. It was good to be able to peacock a little—do some partying, with a new campaign ribbon and the glamour of victory, and some pretties to show off.
Her smile grew smug. She had been very popular, with all the sexes and their permutations; a change from ugly-duckling adolescence. Men are nice, definitely, she thought. Pity I had to wait till I reported to boot camp to start in on ’em.
That was the other thing about the Army; it was better than school. Draka schooling was sex-segregated, on the theory that youth should not be distracted from learning and their premilitary training. Either that or sheer conservatism. Eight months of the year spent isolated in the countryside: from five to eighteen it had been her life, and the last few years had been growing harder to take. She was glad to be out of it, the endless round of gymnastics and classes and petty feuds and crushes; the Army was tougher, paratroop school more so, but what you did off duty was your own business. It was good to be an adult, free.
Even the winter in Mosul had been all right. The town was a hole, of course—provincial, and all new since the Draka conquest in 1916. Nothing like the mellow beauty of Capetown, with its theaters and concerts and famous nightspots . . . Mosul—well, what could you expect of a place whose main claim to fame was petrochemical plants? They’d been up in the mountains most of the time, training hard. She flexed her shoulders and neck complacently. She’d thought herself fit before, but four months of climbing under full load and wrestling equipment over boulders had taken the last traces of puppy fat off and left her with what her people considered the ideal feminine figure—sleek, compactly curved, strong, and quick.
Sofie glanced sidelong at her commander; she thought he’d been noticing, since she qualified for comtech. Couldn’t tell, though; he was one for keeping to himself. Just visited the officer’s Rest Center every week or so. But a man like that wouldn’t be satisfied with serf girls; he’d want someone he could talk to . . .
Or maybe it’s my face? she thought worriedly, absently stripping the clip out of the pistol-grip well of her machine pistol and inserting it again. Her face was still obstinately round and snub-nosed; freckles were all very well, enough men had described it as cute, but it obstinately refused to mature into the cold, aquiline regularity that was most admired. She sighed, lit another cigarette, started running the latest costume drama over again in her head. Tragic Destiny: Signy Anders and Derek Wallis as doomed Loyalist lovers fighting the American rebels, with Carey Plesance playing the satanic traitor George Washington . . .
God, it must have been uncomfortable wearing those petticoats, she thought. No wonder they couldn’t do anything but look pretty and faint; how could you fight while wearing a bloody tent? Good thing Africa cured them of those notions.
0410, Eric thought. Time. The voice of the pilot spoke in his earphones, tinny and remote.
“Coming up on the drop zone, Centurion,” she said. “Wind direction and strength as per briefing. Scattered cloud, bright moonlight.” A pause. “Good luck.”
He nodded, touching his tongue to his lip. The microphone was smooth and heavy in his hand. Beside him, the American war correspondent, Bill Dreiser, looked up from his pad and then continued jotting in shorthand.
* * *
Dreiser finished the paragraph and forced his mind to consider it critically, scanning word by word with the pinhead light on the other end of the pen. Useful, when you had to consult a map or instrument without a conspicuous light; the Domination issued them to all its officers and he had been quick to pick one up. The device was typical of that whole bewildering civilization; he turned it in his hands, feeling the smooth careful machining of its duralumin parts, admiring the compact powerful batteries, the six different colors of ink, the moving segments that made it a slide rule as well.
Typical indeed, he thought wryly. Turned out on specialized machine tools, by illiterate factory serfs who thought the world was flat and that the Combine that owned their contracts ruled the universe.
He licked dry lips, recognizing the thought for what it was: a distraction from fear. He had been through jump training, of course—an abbreviated version tailored to the limitations of a sedentary American in early middle age. And he had seen enough accidents to the youngsters about him to give him well-justified nightmares; if those magnificent young animals could suffer their quota of broken bones and wrenched backs, so could he. And they would be jumping into the arms of Hitler’s Wehrmacht; his years reporting from Berlin had not endeared him to the National Socialists . . .
He glanced across the echoing gloom of the cargo hold to where Eric sat, smoking a last cigarette. His face was impassive, showing no more emotion than it had at briefings around the sand table in Mosul. A strange young man. The eagle-faced blond good looks were almost a caricature of what a landed aristocrat of the Domination of the Draka was expected to be; so was his manner, most of the time. Easy enough to suppose there was nothing there but the bleakly efficient, intellectual killing machine of legend, the amoral and ruthless superman driven by the Will to Power whom Nietzsche had proclaimed.
He had mentioned that to Eric, once. “A useful myth,” had been the Draka’s reply. That had led them to a discussion of the German thinker’s role in developing the Domination’s beliefs; and of how Nietzsche’s philosophy had been modified by the welcoming environment he found among the Draka, so different from the incomprehension and contempt of his countrymen.
“The Domination was founded by losers,” Eric had said, letting an underlying bitterness show through. “Ex-masters like the Loyalists and all those displaced European aristocrats and Confederate southerners; prophets without followers like Carlyle and Gobineau and Nietzsche. The outcasts of Western civilization, not the ‘huddled masses’ you Yankees got. My ancestors were the ones who wouldn’t give up their grudges. Now they’re coming back for their revenge.”
Dreiser shrugged and brought his mind back to the present, tugging at the straps of his harness one more time. Times like this he could understand the isolationists; he had been born in Illinois and raised in Iowa himself, and knew the breed. A lot of them were decent enough, not fascist sympathizers like the German-American Bund, or dupes like Lindberg. Just decent people, and it was so tempting to think the oceans could guard American wholesomeness and decency from the iron insanities and corruptions of Europe . . .
Not that he had ever subscribed to that habit of thought; it led too easily to white sheets and hatred, destroying a tradition to protect it. Dreiser ground his teeth, remembering the pictures from Pearl Harbor—oily smoke pouring to the sky from Battleship Row, the aircraft carrier Enterprise exploding in a huge globe of orange fire as the Japanese dive-bombers caught her in the harbor mouth . . . The United States had paid a heavy price for the illusion of isolation, and now it was fighting on its own soil, full-fledged states like Hawaii and the Philippines under enemy occupation. His prewar warnings of the Nazi menace had not been heeded; now his reports might serve to keep the public aware that Japan was not the only enemy, or the most dangerous of the Axis.